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Standard-setting has come to the forefront in the aftermath of the new EU Standardisation Regulation and recent cases relating to firm behaviour within standard-setting organisations (SSOs). Being for a long time a "no passing zone" for everyone but engineers and technical experts, SSOs have produced a growing solid body of standards that improved our everyday life, from wireless communications to household appliances. If standardisation in goods is vague, standard-setting in services is uncharted territory owing to the tailor-made, typically non-technical nature of rules on services supply. However, interest in this area is growing and the EU has paved the way for a revolution in service standard-setting as encouraged by the controversial EU Services Directive, and, more recently, by the Single Market Act. Based on these developments, the present article maps this new and promising area of rule-making in services, clarifies the substantive scope of the relevant legal instruments and identifies the prospects for pan-European service standards with a view to promoting trade in services.
